From Stranger Things to Hellboy – David Harbour dons the shaved horns

I have yet to see Stranger Things. Disgraceful, right? I’ve made it painfully clear in the few articles I’ve written for this site that horror is my bread and butter. Mostly the older stuff; the established classics that are easy to fall back on when the new stuff disappoints.

But that excuse is wearing thin since horror seems to be on the cusp of a new renaissance as shown by movies like the new IT and the growing multitude of quality horror shows like Stranger Things. And now that David Harbour (Chief Jim Hopper in Stranger Things) has been cast as Hellboy in the new film of the same name, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge if only to see what brought the actor to playing one of my favorite fictional characters.

It was announced months ago that Harbour would be playing Hellboy in the new film directed by Game of Throne’s Neil Marshall but only now photos have been released showing Harbour decked up as the iconic heroic demon from Mike Mignola’s classic graphic novel.

Ron Perlman was the previous actor to play Hellboy, and he absolutely nailed it both in performance and in appearance. Guillermo Del Toro directed Perlman in two Hellboy movies and a third was scheduled but it never came into fruition because of both previous films’ underwhelming box-office performances.

Neil Marshall has previously directed the legendary ‘Watchers on the Wall’ episode of Game of Thrones and one of my favorite horror films, The Descent. So, we know that Marshall can hack it as a director of something as phantasmagorical as Hellboy, and these news pics of Harbour as the demon himself finally confirm that he can fill his hoof-shaped shoes.

David Harbour as Hellboy.

The original graphic novel follows the misadventures of Hellboy, a demon summoned by the Nazis during WW2 but rescued by the Allies and raised to be a hunter of all things that go bump in the night. To give you a taste of what exactly Hellboy goes up against, in one of the Hellboy tales, Conqueror Worm, he goes up against a castle filled with Nazi zombies, robots, cyborg gorillas, reptilian/human hybrids, and finally a giant world-eating maggot brought to earth by the Nazi space program.